Thursday, September 06, 2007

Before the web--or at least before the web got so jam-packed with stuff, stuff of interest to me--my favourite method of workday procrastination was flicking through music books, especially reference books. See, it feels less blatantly nonproductive than sloping off to watch TV (back in the day MTV was a grey area--keeping up with stuff, that was the rationale--but that was way back in the day, when MTV actually showed videos) but was still essentially a form of work avoidance, putting off the task at hand. Webzines, blogs (reading and writing), the sharity bonanza, youtube etc, have pretty much phased out any need for recourse to the tomes (now you can bunk off without even leaving your chair). But occassionally I'll get an urge for some retro skiving and head for those well-thumbed tomes. So it was that flicking through The First Rock & Roll Confidential Report my eye slowed at the book review section (amazed at just how many rock-etc books were being published annually even in 1984) and then came to rest on a little known fact: Nick Tosches actually wrote a book about Hall & Oates! Dangerous Dances: The Authorized Biography, by Nick Tosches with Daryl Hall and John Oates (St Martin's Press)... Now I bet that's something that doesn't appear too often in the dust-jacket flap copy of his subsequent tomes, eh?